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*. This essay has benefitted considerably from helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft by the other contributors to this volume, as well as by Carmen Pavel, David Schmidtz, and an exceptional anonymous reviewer. I thank them for their help and advice, on which I have drawn liberally. All remaining errors are mine.
I.
Introduction
In his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith divides virtue into two broad categories, one "negative" and one "positive." In the "negative" category he includes only "justice," writing: "Mere justice is, upon most occasions, but a negative virtue, and only hinders us from hurting our neighbor."1In the "positive" category he includes several virtues under the term "beneficence," which he describes principally in terms of its absence: the person failing in beneficence "does not do that good which in propriety he ought to have done" (TMS II.ii.1.3); yet "the mere want of beneficence tends to do no real positive evil" (TMS II.ii.1.3). The contrary of justice is injustice, but given Smith's description, we might call it "maleficence," or the taking of action that does "positive hurt" to another (TMS II.ii.1.3).2Similarly, Smith describes the contrary of beneficence merely as a "want" of beneficial positive action, such as when a person "does not recompense his benefactor, when he has it in his power [to do so]" (TMS II.ii.1.3). We might call such a failure to take the positive actions one ought to take "indifference" or "insensibility," both terms Smith uses elsewhere (see, for example, TMS I.ii.3.3). Thus, Smith's account gives us the following taxonomy: (1) refraining from taking action to injure or harm another (that is, "justice"); (2) taking action to harm another ("injury" or maleficence); and (3) taking action to help another ("beneficence").
Smith's conception seems relatively straightforward, but it faces difficulties. The first comes from Smith himself, since in various places he seems either to give competing conceptions of justice or to include what might seem like beneficent actions as part of justice. Beyond the coherence of Smith's own account, however, it would seem that his predominantly "negative" conception of justice, which he goes on to argue should be the principal...